nude & not

In moments of disaster, some voices do more than report—they hold the world steady. Genie Chance, a journalist and mother, was one such voice.

When an earthquake shattered Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964—splitting roads, toppling buildings, swallowing homes—the world cracked open. Chaos reigned. And yet, through the static of fear and uncertainty, one woman’s voice cut through. For nearly thirty hours, Genie Chance remained on air, broadcasting critical updates, coordinating rescue efforts, offering comfort. She turned radio waves into lifelines, making connection possible when everything else had failed.

There was no grand stage for her heroism, no preordained role. She simply acted—because action was needed. Her voice, steady and sure, filled the void left by collapsing infrastructure. She reminded people that they were not alone. That someone was still there, guiding, informing, holding space for survival.

Heroism is often depicted in loud, cinematic moments—flames, sirens, dramatic rescues. But Genie Chance’s heroism was quieter, more persistent. She proved that sometimes, saving a city isn’t about rebuilding structures. It’s about holding people together with nothing but words, sent out into the dark.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has long been read as a cautionary tale about science, creation, and the limits of human ambition. But beneath its gothic horror lies another story—one about power, autonomy, and who has the right to control life itself.

Written by an eighteen-year-old woman in a world where women had little control over their own bodies, Frankensteinpulses with the anxieties of forced creation. Victor Frankenstein assembles life without consent, shaping a body that is both extraordinary and doomed. The creature, abandoned and feared, never asked to be made—his existence is an act of power, not choice.

In this light, Frankenstein becomes eerily prophetic. It speaks to the struggle for reproductive rights, the battle over who decides what happens to a body, who gets to create life, and under what terms. Shelley, who knew the traumas of pregnancy and loss firsthand, gives us a story where unchecked control over creation leads to suffering, where denial of agency breeds destruction.

More than two centuries later, her novel remains unsettlingly relevant. The fight for bodily autonomy rages on, in courtrooms and legislatures, in protests and conversations. And perhaps Frankenstein still whispers a warning: when power is taken without consent, the consequences are monstrous.

Long before women were expected to have opinions—let alone publish them—Margaret Fuller made it her life’s work to think, to write, to demand more. She did not fit neatly into the spaces the world offered her, so she carved out her own. A journalist, a critic, a revolutionary thinker, she held conversations that stretched minds and wrote words that unsettled the status quo.

She believed women deserved not just education, but the freedom to explore the full range of human potential. She did not argue for equality in polite terms—she insisted upon it, lived it, refused to shrink herself for the comfort of those who thought too small. To her, intellect was not a privilege but a right, and she exercised hers relentlessly.

Her life was a series of risks—challenging the rigidity of gender roles, traveling to Europe to report on revolutions, choosing love on her own terms. She drowned in a shipwreck at 40, her manuscripts lost to the waves. But her ideas could not be drowned. They carried forward in the women who read her, who debated her, who saw in her proof that a life of the mind was possible, that a woman could be vast.

Margaret Fuller did not ask for space. She took it. And in doing so, she left behind not just words, but permission—for every woman after her to do the same.

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Love is often written in poetry, in sonnets, in grand declarations. But sometimes, love is written in letters—honest, unfinished, alive. This was the love of feminism’s founding mother Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two minds who dared to think beyond convention, even when it came to the heart.

Wollstonecraft, fierce in her convictions, had long rejected the notion that marriage defined a woman. Godwin, a philosopher, had believed love and reason could not coexist. And yet, in each other, they found something that defied their own beliefs—intimacy without ownership, devotion without erasure.

Their letters were not just sweet nothings; they were full of intellectual debate, longing, vulnerability. Love, for them, was not a contract but a conversation—one that allowed for independence, for solitude, for two whole selves choosing each other without losing themselves. Even in the face of tragedy—Mary’s untimely death after giving birth to their daughter, Mary Shelley—their love lived on in ink, in words that outlived the fleetingness of breath.

To read their letters is to witness something rare: a romance that did not require surrender, a relationship where love and freedom walked hand in hand. It is a reminder that the truest partnerships do not ask us to shrink, but to expand.

There are those who look at the night sky and marvel at its mystery. And then there are those who decode it. Mary Somerville was among the latter. At a time when women were gently discouraged—if not outright barred—from the realms of mathematics and science, she taught herself the language of the universe. She read Newton as one reads poetry, tracing the curvature of space with the same quiet devotion one might give to the curve of a beloved’s face.

Born in 1780 in Scotland, Mary was not meant to be a scholar. Her girlhood was shaped by embroidery samplers, not equations. Education was rationed for women then, as if too much knowledge might render them unfit for their expected roles. But she was restless, collecting scraps of learning wherever she could find them. Algebraic symbols became her secret script, equations her rebellion.

Her greatest contribution was not just her own discoveries but her gift of translation—of taking the cryptic dialect of mathematics and rendering it legible to those outside the ivory tower of academia. It was her book, The Mechanism of the Heavens, that introduced the English-speaking world to celestial mechanics. It was through her words that generations understood the intricate dance of the planets, the pull of gravity, the poetry embedded in physics.

Somerville’s intellect was undeniable, but her existence as a woman in science was met with suspicion. The very notion of a female mathematician was so unsettling that when a group of scholars sought a word to describe women capable of excelling in multiple disciplines, they coined the term scientist—for her. And so, with each theorem she proved, with each celestial secret she unraveled, she expanded not just the boundaries of science but the boundaries of what a woman was allowed to be.

Today, her name is written in the stars—literally, as an asteroid bears her name, but also in every woman who dares to ask, What else is possible? She was not merely a woman in science; she was a woman who made science larger, more human, more whole. And for that, we owe her more than a footnote in history. We owe her a place in the constellations of our own becoming.

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There are journalists who report the world, and then there are those who hurl themselves into it, shaping the story with their own existence. Nellie Bly was the latter. Long before the world made space for women in newsrooms, she forced her way in—not by asking politely, but by proving, over and over, that she was better than the men who doubted her.

Born in 1864 as Elizabeth Cochran, she took on the name Nellie Bly and never looked back. When a newspaper column mocked women for having ambitions beyond marriage, she didn’t just write an angry letter—she wrote herself into journalism. The editor was so taken by her wit that he gave her a job. And from there, she did what women were told they couldn’t do: hard-hitting, fearless investigative reporting.

Her most famous feat remains her exposé of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She faked madness, got herself committed, and lived the horrors firsthand—moldy food, freezing nights, the cruelty of doctors who did not care to heal. Ten days later, her story shattered the illusion of humane institutions, forcing reforms that saved lives. She had turned journalism into a weapon, and she wielded it without hesitation.

But she wasn’t done. When Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days captivated the world, she turned fiction into reality. She set off on her own race against time, alone, with nothing but a small bag and an iron will. Seventy-two days later, she had circled the globe, proving that the limits imposed on women were just myths waiting to be broken.

Nellie Bly didn’t just write about history—she made it. She was not merely a witness to injustice but its challenger. Today, every woman who dares to speak truth to power, who refuses to let the world define her limits, walks a path she cleared. Journalism did not have space for her. So she carved her own.

And in doing so, she left behind a simple lesson: If the world won’t give you a seat at the table, take the whole damn newsroom.

Cinderella has always been a story of waiting. Waiting to be saved, waiting to be chosen, waiting for magic to arrive and make life bearable. But what if Cinderella had chosen herself? What if, instead of a prince, she found freedom?

Rebecca Solnit reimagines the old fairy tale, peeling away the layers of passivity and revealing a different truth—one where Cinderella does not dream of marriage but of agency. Where the fairy godmother’s magic is not about transforming her into something desirable but about reminding her of what she has always been: capable, enough, her own.

In Cinderella Liberator, there is no grand rescue. The prince is kind, but he is not the answer. The glass slipper is not proof of worth but a relic of an outdated script. Instead, Cinderella leaves the palace on her own terms, choosing a life of possibility over a life of ornamentation. She opens a bakery, creates a world on her own hands and feet, and invites others into a life not of servitude but of self-made joy.

This is no longer a story about finding the right shoe—it is about walking in any direction she chooses. Solnit rewrites the ending not as a love story but as a liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that we have always had the power to walk away from the stories that do not serve us.

Because the truest kind of happily-ever-after is the one we write for ourselves.

In the early 1900s, Edith Clements became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in botany in the United States. But her name, like so many others, is often lost in the underbrush of history. What remains is her work—an extraordinary book of botanical illustrations, Rocky Mountain Flowers, in which she painted the delicate, defiant life of alpine flora.

These were not cultivated garden blooms, tended to with care. They were wild, enduring against the sharpest winds, growing in the thinnest air. It takes a certain kind of quiet defiance to bloom where others believe nothing can survive. Edith Clements, through her art and scholarship, showed us that beauty is not only found in the grand, the lush, the obvious—but in the smallest petals pushing up through the cracks.

Women, too, have been expected to thrive under impossible conditions. They have been asked to be both soft and strong, rooted yet free, ornamental yet essential. And still, like wildflowers, they persist.

Perhaps this is what makes Clements’ work more than just a botanical study—it is a love letter to resilience, a quiet reminder that even in the most unlikely places, something beautiful can take root and flourish.

There is something quiet yet monumental about the act of holding. Women have held things since the beginning of time—babies and burdens, love and loss, history and hope. It is a gesture so instinctive, so ingrained in the everyday, that it often goes unnoticed. But within this act of holding lies a story—one that speaks of resilience, tenderness, and a quiet, unwavering strength.

Maira Kalman’s book Women Holding Things is a tender meditation on this unspoken labor. With her signature whimsy and wisdom, she paints women holding everything from literal objects—a cat, a tray of sandwiches, a handful of wildflowers—to the intangible weight of emotions and responsibilities. Some women hold joy, others hold grief. Some hold the expectations of the world, while others hold the audacity to defy them.

It is a book that does not ask for grand conclusions. Instead, it invites us to pause and witness—a woman carrying her groceries, a grandmother cradling a memory, a friend holding space for another. These are the small, quiet acts that stitch together the fabric of life.

Perhaps the question is not just what women hold, but how they hold. With grace, despite exhaustion. With care, despite chaos. With love, despite the weight. And maybe, in recognizing this, we learn that we too are held—in the hands, hearts, and histories of the women who came before us.